Police are looking for a New Jersey woman after she allegedly attacked a white man at a Virginia gas pump and called his wife—who is white—“racial slurs,” leading to the incident being investigated as a possible hate crime.

According to WTVR, the incident occurred over the weekend at a Carmel Church Exxon gas station off Interstate 95. A man named Bob, who did not want his last name published, said he and his wife stopped at the gas station while driving back home in their Porsche from Florida to Massachusetts, hauling a boat behind the vehicle.

Bob said that while he was pumping gas, a woman started screaming at him.

“This lady was a couple pumps over and talking to me and yelling at somebody about having a message for her. I had no idea what she was talking about,” Bob said. “I was coming around the side of the car, and next thing I know a car blocks me in. She comes out of her car, gets in my face and yelling at me about some sort of message I got for her.”

Bob told the news station that he tried to ignore the woman, but then she threatened to put a hole in his “fancy boat” and grabbed a hammer.

Advertisement

“She actually took a hammer and she hit his vehicle and the boat,” Caroline County Sheriff Tony Lippa told the news station. “She actually clawed him. He took her down to the ground to prevent her from doing any more damage.”

“I let her go and she grabbed the hammer again and hit the boat again,” Bob added. “[The hammer] broke. That’s when she figured out she better get out of there because she didn’t have a weapon anymore.”

While Bob and the woman were struggling with one another, a witness took a photo of the woman’s vehicle, leading investigators to identify the suspect as 26-year-old Angela M. Jones of Newark, N.J.

Advertisement

Bob’s wife, who was inside the gas station bathroom while the attack was happening, came back outside to find her husband bloody.

“There were some racial slurs directed at her, at which time the accused spit in her face,” Sheriff Lippa said. “According to the victim, there were racial slurs that were yelled at her before she spit at her, and that’s what we’re looking into as far as it being a hate crime.”

The couple said that the woman said that she was “sick of fancy white people.”

“I have no idea why she started going after us, but I guess she thought we were some rich people,” Bob said.

Advertisement

Jones is wanted in Caroline County on charges of malicious wounding, assault and destruction of property. The New Jersey State Police have been contacted in an effort to locate her.